Monday, July 10, 2006

Dishing, But Not Taking

The legislative branch seems to feel that it has the inherent authority to oversee the executive's exercise of his duties as commander-in-chief, especially when it comes to intelligence programs -- Exhibit A is the Hoekstra letter. Nor do legislators seem particularly troubled by judicial interference in the President's execution of his commander-in-chief duties (of all the outrage expressed over Hamden, precious few legislators condemned the judicial meddling itself).

But how differently legislators react when the shoe is on the other foot! Righteous bipartisan anger erupted on the Hill when the Justice Department searched Rep. William Jefferson's office, even though the search was pursuant to a validly executed warrant.

And now, the legality of the search has been upheld. That won't make the legislators happy -- they seem OK with inter-branch interference when they're "overseeing" the executive, but not so much when the executive branch shows up to prosecute one of them.

Since they had EVIDENCE indicating wrong-doing, like PICTURES of money changing hands, they went to Jefferson. They apparently did not have EVIDENCE in the cases of Delay, etc, etc. Evidence IS a key requirement for searches, duke.

It took three Grand Juries to even begin to remotely convince people of Delay's 'alleged' misuse of funds. And the partisan prosecutor has yet to get it to trial! Could there be no case? Nah! Delay's a Republican - rotten and crooked to the core.

When are you going to get over your obvious hatred for anyone or anything slightly to the right of your extremist left wing view point, duke?

Come to think of it, why did I waste valuable time responding to you? Oh, well, since I wrote it, I will post it.

And, BTW: This is the quote from the story on NewsMax regarding the pictures:

"An affidavit filed with Hogan to justify the May search says the FBI videotaped Jefferson in August 2005 accepting $100,000 from a business executive, who actually was a government informant. The FBI said it subsequently recovered $90,000 from a freezer at Jefferson's home."

The whole article is at: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/7/10/215501.shtml?s=ic

I'm perfectly fine with the three branches of government testing their boundaries. That's what keeps each branch in check. Personally, I'd like to see Congress attempt to exercise a little more control over the Judiciary.